Notes on “That Scene” in Black Swan

If you’ve seen Black Swan, you know what I’m talking about.  If you haven’t, 1) there’s a good chance you’ve still heard of the scene, and 2) this is your official spoiler warning.  I myself had heard of it before I saw the film, and it in fact added to my interest in seeing it, but afterwards, while I thought the scene itself was cool and well-done, I found it problematic within the greater context of the film.

The scene in question, with a little added backdrop, is this.  Nina has been working herself ragged trying to portray the thrilling, seductive Black Swan character in Swan Lake, and her director takes every opportunity to remind her that, in order to dance the part, she needs to tap into her darker impulses, and as is, she’s too “pure” and “fragile” to embody the character.  Trying to take that advice, she defies her obsessively-controlling mother to spend a night on the town with fellow dancer Lily, who’s everything Nina thinks she needs to be as the Black Swan.  Under Lily’s influence, Nina finally lets loose, drinking, getting high, and dancing in a club instead of in a rehearsal studio.  When they head back to Nina’s apartment, they lock themselves in Nina’s bedroom.  With an aggressively hungry look, Nina approaches Lily and they begin to make out.  Lily pushes Nina onto the bed and goes down on her, and Nina is sexually gratified for almost certainly the first time in her life.

Like I said, the scene is well-shot and effective.  Prior to Orange is the New Black and Game of Thrones, I’d noted multiple times how sterile and off-camera virtually every female/female sex scene I’d ever seen seemed to be, and this was a definite exception: steamy, non-coy, and, due to Nina’s increasingly-intrusive hallucinations, kind of trippy.  (Side note – generally speaking, I’d rate Orange is the New Black’s female/female sex scenes much higher than Game of Thrones’s, since the latter’s tend to feel much more exploitative and male-gaze-focused.)  However, its implications within the rest of the film give me pause.

First, it takes the already-troubling idea of the Black Swan into even more uncomfortable territory.  The Black Swan is the White Swan’s evil twin, and other than the different color and the scary makeup, literally the only way Nina’s director describes this inherent darkness and danger is through the Black Swan’s seductive sexuality.  In contrast with the gentle, virginal White Swan, it’s the Madonna-whore complex cranked up to eleven.  Equating female sexuality with “evilness” or “darkness” is such an ugly notion, anyway, but when Nina gets in touch with her “dark side” by sleeping with a woman, it mixes in an extra helping of the damaging idea that LGBTQ sexuality is more “sinful” than its heteronormative counterpart.  It reminds me of the very unfortunate period of House in which the bisexual Thirteen has one-night-stands with women when she’s in a self-destructive downward spiral and monogamously dates her (male) coworker Foreman when she’s in a better place emotionally.

The scene is further complicated by the fact that it apparently didn’t happen; when Nina tries to talk to Lily about it the next day, the other dancer is puzzled and ultimately realizes that Nina must have had a “lezzie wet dream” about her.  So sleeping with Lily isn’t just representative of Nina’s “dark side” – it’s also a drug-induced fantasy and/or further evidence of Nina’s actual descent into madness.  This is female/female attraction as a metaphor, and not an encouraging one, rather than simply a trait of the character, and that bothers me.